Firms, companies, financial institutions and other corporate entities expend significant financial resources to understand the questions, issues and requirements that impact the business environment in which they operate.
Calculating a return on investment for various business activities such as employee training can be a speculative exercise under the best of circumstances. For example, trying to understand the business issue of why employee training costs are at a certain level of expense or how to improve the effectiveness of training can be daunting tasks. The data sets necessary to perform these analyses can be difficult or prohibitively costly to obtain, and the collected data may be inaccurate or incomplete. Also, even if such data are available in a digestible format, the data may not reflect the correct or most useful kind of indicators necessary to measure and assess the economic value of human resource activities such as employee training.
In view of the foregoing issues, enhanced systems, processes, tools, techniques and strategies are needed for optimally correlating business requirements or questions with data sets that can be used to properly assess the business questions.